Lives of the Enslaved at Stagville Plantation To Be Topic of Exhibit and Lecture Nov. 8

Generations of Captivity in North Carolina: The Bennehan-Cameron Plantations, 1776-1865Lecture by Sydney Nathans
Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011Wilson Special Collections Library
5 p.m. Reception and Exhibit Viewing, 4th floor
5:30 p.m. Program, Pleasants Family Assembly Room
Free and open to the public
Information: Liza Terll, Friends of the Library, (919) 548-1203

The lives of people enslaved at the Stagville Plantation in what now is Durham County, N.C., will be the focus of a lecture and exhibit at the Wilson Special Collections Library. The program and exhibit are free and open to the public.

Sydney Nathans, professor emeritus of history at Duke University, will give a lecture Nov. 8 titled “Generations of Captivity in North Carolina: The Bennehan-Cameron Plantations, 1776-1865.” The lecture will open the exhibit in the Wilson Library’s 4th floor gallery, Kin and Community: African American Lives at Stagville, on view through Mar. 2, 2012.

Nathans has devoted much of his academic life to working in the Cameron Family Papers in the Southern Historical Collection, focusing on relations between whites and blacks and the lives of black families who lived on the Bennehan-Cameron family’s extensive plantations in Orange (now Durham) County.

The Cameron family, which also had substantial plantations in Alabama and Mississippi, was among North Carolina’s largest landholders and slaveholders.